Wednesday, January 1, 2014

There was no accident. Those things did it and they'll do it again. Even now I can still hear those scratchy little voices saying, “Meat. Meat.”

You know the story from the papers; cross country bus blows a tire and goes crashing into a ravine in the Arizona desert, thirty-seven dead or vanished and one survivor.

Some of you might think this is an appropriate punishment. At the time fleeing from New York to Los Angeles seemed like my only option. Did I think about Claire waiting at the altar in front of an audience of her family and friends? No, not at all.

It happened about an hour after we crossed the state line. What I remember is the bus swerving and pitching over. Everyone was thrown against the ceiling then back to the floor. We rolled seven times in all. I struck the roof of the bus head first, there was a loud crack that I felt and heard.

I'm not sure how long I was out, long enough for the bus to stop rolling but not much more than that. All around me people were sobbing and groaning, some were calling 911, the pale light from their cell phones casting an ugly glow over everything. The bus had landed on its side, a pair of seats had torn loose from the floor and I was pinned beneath them. Only my head and left arm were free but I couldn’t move them. I couldn’t even feel them. I was right beside a dead man, he was staring at me with a surprised expression.

The things came crawling in through the shattered windshield. I thought they were children at first but the light of the cell phones revealed they were naked, gray skinned Things. The people near the front of the bus started screaming. Groups of the things surrounded each survivor and started chanting “Meat. Meat!” before dragging them away. Whenever those things came upon someone that had died they would prod and sniff at the body experimentally. Once were sure of it they would hiss “Corpse.” and move on.

Most of the survivors were too injured to move, those that did try to run or fight didn't make it far.

I knew what I had to do, I laid perfectly still in the blood and the broken glass with my eyes closed and my breathing shallow. Be dead. I thought to myself, Be dead.

“Meat! Meat!”

“Corpse!”

I listened to them toy with the dead body beside me, lifting its head up and dropping it back down on the broken glass. “Corpse.” The thing sounded disappointed, “Corpse.”

Maybe you would have screamed by now. How long could you have held your breath? How long could you have laid still? There is no doubt in my mind that being hidden under a pile of twisted metal and fabric is one of the things that saved my life.

Just one of them.

The things began sniffing at me, their breath smelled of rot and reptiles. I imagined my skin prickling with revulsion. I was sure Those things would notice, I was sure that any moment They would take me like the others.

“Corpse?”

One of Them took an experimental bite out of my arm. I only noticed because of the warm spray that hit my face. There was the sound of thoughtful chewing.

“Corpse.”

Then they left.

Where did Those Things take the survivors? And why didn’t the police and paramedics find any footprints or drag marks in the desert sand? The authorities are blaming coyotes but they’ve seen the teeth marks on me. No coyote leaves a wound like that.

The police just won’t believe me. They roll their eyes and tell me I was unconscious and dreaming the whole time.

I’ve given up trying to make them listen. I just want to go home, I want to get out of this hospital and out of this state but the doctors say it isn’t safe to do that. They say I have a long recovery ahead before travel becomes an option. Internal decapitation is what they call it. When my head hit on the roof of the bus my spine separated from my skull. I’m paralyzed from the neck down, I can’t feel anything; not my legs or my arms, not even a bite on the shoulder. That’s what saved me.

My parents and brother are coming to see me. They couldn’t afford a flight from New York, we’re not wealthy people, so they’re driving here. Dad called a couple of times from the road to check in. He even called to let me know they when they were crossing the Arizona border.

You know I mocked these kind of books pretty hard when I found out about them but some of these writers were making $2000 a month! It stinks that the so called 'forces of decency' had to get between them and their audiences...

In October, the online news site The Kernel published an incendiary story called "An Epidemic of Filth," claiming that online bookstores like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, WHSmith, and others were selling self-published ebooks that featured "rape fantasies, incest porn and graphic descriptions of bestiality and child abuse." The story ignited a media firestorm in the U.K, with major news outlets like the Daily Mail, The Guardian, and the BBC reporting on the “sales of sick ebooks.” Some U.K.-based ebook retailers responded with public apologies, and WHSmith went so far as to shut down its website altogether, releasing a statement saying that it would reopen "once all self-published eBooks have been removed and we are totally sure that there are no offending titles available." The response in the U.S. was somewhat more muted, but most of the retailers mentioned in the piece, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble, began quietly pulling hundreds of titles from their online shelves — an event Kobo coo Michael Tamblyn referred to last month as "erotica-gate...

The crackdown was meant to target the obvious offenders — ebooks like "Daddy’s Birthday Gang Bang" and others that fetishized incest and rape — but in their fervor to course-correct, the online bookstores started deleting, according to The Digital Reader blog, "not just the questionable erotica but [also].... any e-books that might even hint at violating cultural norms." That included crypto-porn. Wade’s sexy Sasquatch, not unlike the elusive hominid beast of legend, vanished without a trace.

ut it wasn’t just Bigfoot who was herded into extinction. Wade says that 60% of her titles disappeared from Amazon and other online bookstores. "They started sending my books randomly back to draft mode" — where new ebooks are uploaded and edited before going on sale — "and I'd get an email from them saying, 'We found the following books in violation of our content guidelines,'” she recalls. “But they wouldn't tell me why. There were no specifics. It was a huge guessing game trying to figure out what the issue was..."